You must master a new way to think, before you can master a new way to be.

Look Back in forgiveness, forward in hope, down in compassion and up in gratitude.

I did not ask for success; I asked for wonder.

If you develop an image of success, health, abundance, joy, peace, happiness, nothing on earth will be able to hold those things from you.

Life and success are about what you choose to believe.

Do people choose the art that inspires them — do they think it over, decide they might prefer the fabulous to the real? For me, it was those early readings of fairy tales that made me who I was as a reader and, later on, as a storyteller.

He wasn't the first man she'd been with, and that hadn't been Bill back home either. It had been a boy she met on holiday when she was fifteen. She had decided it was time for her to have sex, the way someone else might decide it was time to get a driver's license, and she'd gone ahead with it. Pragmatic, that's the way she'd always been.

Trying to chase that old white man out of my head. I been so busy thinking bout him I never truly notice nothing God make. Not a blade of corn (how it do that?) not the color purple (where it come from?). Not the little wildflowers. Nothing.

Still, it is like Shug say, You have to git man off your eyeball, before you can see anything a'tall

hadn't realized I was so ignorant, Celie. The little I knew about my own self wouldn't have filled a thimble! And to think Miss Beasley always said I was the smartest child she ever taught! But one thing I do thank her for, for teaching me to learn for myself, by reading and studying and writing a clear hand. And for keeping alive in me somehow the desire to know.

Or maybe he should always just expect the worst. Most often he would be right, and the few times he was not, at least he would be pleasantly surprised.

People of excellence go the extra mile to do what's right.